A Month-Long Finals Week

That's pretty much what this feels like.  I can tell because the following things have either already happened or are likely to happen:

1.  We are stress eating (Ryan ate two Sausage McMuffins and an Egg McMuffin for breakfast the other day.  We had eaten McDonald's for dinner the night before).  This has to do not just with stress, but also with the fact that we have very little time to cook actual meals at this point.

2.  I anticipate I will cry in public sometime in the next ten days.

3.  I'm falling back on my go-to finals week comfort phrase - "Pass or fail, this will be over in X hours/days."

Okay, so that sounds pretty extreme.  And it sort of is.  But we're also having fun and learning a lot.  Equal parts stress and learning.

Why is it stressful?  We are literally already teaching 45 minute English lessons to Czech students.  We had five days of our own classroom learning and then they were like "You're teaching Monday-Thursday!"  So I have taught four times already and will teach seven more times before the end.  The other part is that they don't tell you what you're teaching the next day until your lesson is over.  So for instance on Wednesday I taught a reading lesson from 4-5pm and then found out that I had to prepare a lesson on Phrasal Verbs for Thursday afternoon.  Oh, and we have lecture all morning so basically we are planning late at night and between breaks.  We were so tired at the end of the week.

Anyway, this is why we haven't been blogging very much.  We have class from 9:30am-1pm every day, then we teach in the afternoons or evenings.  We are broken into small groups and have to stay for every lesson our group members teach.  I was teaching Intermediates with another girl from 3-6pm last week.  Ryan was teaching Pre-Intermediates with two other guys from 5-8:30pm all last week.  This coming week I'm moving to Beginners and Ryan is going to Upper Intermediate.

In addition to lesson planning, we have large weekly homeworks and during the final week we have a giant grammar test.  It's pretty much TEFL boot camp.

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Here's a fun fact we've learned.

There are many English words that have made their way into the Czech language, but only one Czech word that exists in English.  What is it?

I'll give you a hint...

Domo Arigato, Mr. ___________

That's right!  "Robot" is a Czech word.  Bet you didn't know that.